CARD MRI is a financial services company in the Philippines with a noble aim – to help millions of poor rural women and their families not just survive but also prosper. It delivers successfully on its mission through microloans, affordable insurance, banking, and education.
The company works with Kaseya to make IT operations efficient, able to scale, and move along an aggressive path to greater IT maturity. Card MRI uses a combination of VSA and BMS by Kaseya to automate and secure IT infrastructure and endpoints, and manage projects and interactions with end users.
Raul Dizon, Head of IT for CARD MRI, is driving his organization from one that responded to problems to one that is now proactive and service oriented. His goal is to move to a higher stage he calls innovation.
The NMI Connection
Card MRI takes its IT seriously. As one of 22 companies under the Card MRI banner, CARD MRI Information Technology, Inc. (CMIT) is an IT services company that handles the needs of its parent.
The Card MRI subsidiary helped drive that charge. “CMIT is an online consulting company, and it has enlightened us with a lot of processes, especially [those that are] ITIL-based. There are different maturity levels they have shown us, and we are trying to grow along these levels. They are from firefighter, to a stabilized company, to a proactive company, a service provider, and finally an innovator. To comply with this, we have to comply with around 24 ITIL processes,” Dizon explained.
The firefighter stage is what MSPs know as break/fix. “As a firefighter, we just go with the flow. If there are problems, we react. That’s how we were before,” he said. “Because of Kaseya and CMIT, we have moved up to the stabilized maturity level. With the ITIL processes in place, we have change management, incident/problem, and request fulfillment, and we have users involved in problem resolution.”
Dizon believes his organization is more proactive, and part of this is from using BMS by Kaseya, a PSA solution that is tightly integrated with the VSA RMM. “At the proactive level, we are using and have just implemented PSA in almost 1,600 devices, laptops and desktops, and are adding another 700,” he explained. “We have automatically discovered workstations, so with the help of VSA, it is now easy to have an inventory of what we have. There is the joy of really having the peace of mind to know what you have, and what the problems are nationwide with all your devices.”
Moving up the IT Maturity Ladder
CMIT is also a service provider. “We are going to the service provider level since we are supporting the members of the group, and another IT company through a joint venture. We have to provide service-level reports to their board, to the clients, and are now capable of providing them,” Dizon says.
Part of being highly mature is seeing IT as a business driver. “We are aligned with the business. For user acceptance and buy-in, customer service is very important. It is an indicator of how well we are providing services,” he says. “So far so good. Our board is very happy. We have a measure of how good the service is, or how bad the service is that we are providing our clients.”
There is more to achieve. “Thanks to VSA, we are hoping to get to innovator, and of course that would require having an enterprise architecture,” he said.
CMIT Goals
Dizon continues to drive his IT organization forward. “We are now into our second IT strategic road mapping, and embarking on new technology, especially mobile, to reach out to the farthest members through mobile and ecommerce,” he said. “We need to provide a lot of progress in services through these applications such as e-commerce, to drive the economy in the rural area, even if they only have 10 sacks of rice to sell.”
Dizon has clearly found a winning formula. “You need three things to be very successful. You need a good product, and Kaseya with the help of NMI is a very good product. The best product I have seen since my mainframe days,” Dizon said. “But you have to have good processes. That is why I embarked on implementing the ITIL processes. For instance, we engaged the industrial engineers at NMI to document and revise job descriptions, finalize the processes, implement metrics for process, and relate all metrics and KPIs so that with the technology given us and the KPI, it will now be reflected in the performance evaluation of personnel and even in the balanced scorecard. This is how we can ensure that good service can be provided,” he said. The result is a “combination of good product, and process implementation, connected to job description and performance evaluation.”
Read the full Case Study to learn more about how Kaseya is making impossible IT jobs possible for Card MRI.
